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New Mandela book reveals secret, in-prison recordings

18 August 2020 | Story Rulanzen Martin | Photo NB Publishers

Prison 913_web read more — Prisoner 913: The Release of Nelson Mandela will give readers the opportunity to meet Nelson Mandela as man, husband, father, politician, strategist and diplomat, all in his own words.

It is well known that prisoner number 46664 is synonymous with Nelson Mandela and the historical account of his imprisonment on Robben Island. But few people know that 913 was in fact Nelson Mandela’s actual cell number on Robben Island. With the release of a new book, Prisoner 913: The Release of Nelson Mandela, Dr Jan-Ad Stemmet from the Department of History at the University of the Free State (UFS), and his co-author Riaan de Villiers, narrate the verbatim, untold story of Mandela’s time in Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons, after his imprisonment on Robben Island.

Prisoner 913: The Release of Nelson Mandela is, as yet, the only book which tells the factual behind-the-scenes story of the events that led to Mandela’s release, in his own words, recorded without his knowledge. “The book moves far behind and beyond the ‘official narrative’ and explains what process and moments interlocked to eventually unlock his prison doors,” says Stemmet.

For readers and scholars with a keen interest in the history of Mandela, the book is a time machine which takes the reader to the actual moment history was made. “The reader becomes the proverbial ‘fly on the wall’ and gains immediate access to the country’s history being made in real time, undiluted and in the moment,” he says.

Coetsee archive collection holds key to Mandela’s ‘in-prison’ story

The book is the product of a seven-year project which started when Stemmet opened a box from the Kobie Coetsee Collection at the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at the UFS. Kobie Coetsee was Minister of Justice and Correctional Affairs from 1980-1984.

“The boxes were stacked with verbatim transcripts of someone classified as ‘913’. I was totally confused but fascinated. I requested similar boxes,” says Stemmet, who admits it took him some time to decipher that 913 was a code name for Nelson Mandela. “These were the word-for-word transcripts off all the secretly recorded conversations with Madiba that were conducted in jail during the 1980s and ending with his release in 1990,” Stemmet says.

Riaan de Villiers, left, and Dr Jan-AdStemmet. Photos: Supplied
Amongst these transcripts were ‘heaps of government materials related to Mandela’, on how the PW Botha apartheid administration viewed Prisoner 913. “Eventually I sat with more than 10 000 pages of transcripts and documents, stamped “top secret”, detailing (and intimately so) his last years in jail,” says Stemmet.

Dr Stemmet and his co-author, journalist Riaan de Villiers, are of the opinion that the book will contribute to a national reorientation towards a period that still causes a lot confusion. “We hope that it may just contribute to a deeper sense of historical understanding, which is so desperately needed for any chance of real reconciliation, or at least empathy for the past.”

News Archive

Arts Festival Rally promises to be great fun

2009-05-20

The annual Amazing Rainbow Rally, presented by the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health and UFS Marketing, will take place on Friday, 17 July 2009 during the Volksblad Arts Festival on the Main Campus of the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein.

This year all the checkpoints will be on the campus and around the Arts Festival grounds. Corporate companies in Bloemfontein and departments at the UFS may still enter teams and checkpoints.

The closing date for entering teams is 26 June 2009. A team consists of two team members who must work together to complete a route with various checkpoints. The team, who finishes first after having successfully completed all the tasks, is the winner. Last year, Dr I Babst en Dr L Solomon from the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health were the winners of the Rally.

The closing date for entering a checkpoint is 17 June 2009. Teams must complete tasks at every checkpoint before proceeding to the next checkpoint. The company sponsoring the checkpoint will also be responsible for handling the activity at the checkpoint.

The “Arts Festival” Rally promises to challenge teams physically, mentally and even artistically. Festival goers will also have the opportunity to see what teams get up to and how their favourite team is doing.

The Rally will be presented for the fifth time in 2009. The main goal of this year’s Rally is to raise funds for the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health’s “Beds of Hope Campaign”. This campaign seeks to increase the number of intensive care beds in the paediatric and neonatal wards. Currently around 250 children and babies in central South Africa cannot receive the life-saving care they need because of a lack of facilities.

For more information and entry forms, contact Ms Adéle van Aswegen at 051 401 3535 or e-mail to vanasweg.stg@ufs.ac.za . You can also visit our website at http://bedsofhope.ufs.ac.za

Media Release
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: loaderl.stg@ufs.ac.za

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